With the moral stamina & intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan this slightly built duitful unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth steadfastly to think it through & then to render it comprehensible in lucid unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events & with the most contempible. What has survived in Levis writing isnt just his memory of the unbearable but also in THE PERIODIC TABLE & THE WRENCH his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man the most delicately forceful enchanter Ive ever known"
- PHILIP ROTH"